A recent study of brain scans in 125 people from multiple locations in the U.S. and Europe suggests a set of patterns of brain activity that are closely linked to differentiating human consciousness from unconsciousness, which has been an elusive Holy Grail for neuroscientists. [1] While the patterns are not yet “sufficient proof” of consciousness, this finding gives us one… Read more »
The characteristic of the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian super-loyal endorsers of “Everything Trump” that continues to confound me most is how they have appeared to toss over three thousand years of classical Judeo-Christian moral/ethical thought in exchange for a decidedly-secular Renaissance ethical model, the famous one expounded by the Italian politician Niccolò Machiavelli. [1] Machiavelli’s famous dictum of “the end… Read more »
Charges of “socialist” seem to be emerging as primary attack strategy by Republicans toward Democrats as the 2020 elections fire up. It is, in my view, all an inane “Humpty Dumpty” twisting of the terms capitalist and socialist to mean “whatever I choose them to mean” in order to raise the ire of captive television and online audiences. In addition,… Read more »
In a prior post, I noted that the most-cited debate between science and religion, that of Darwinian evolution, is “the easy problem to solve” in this face-off. Millions of Christians and major denominational bodies have already come to a reconciliation with the science, simply by understanding, as St. Augustine of Hippo recognized by the early 5th century, that the short… Read more »
Human language is how we are supposed to communicate with each other, but during my experience living in the United Kingdom, I had some co-workers who spoke in forms of English so different from my Midwestern US flatness that I was able to capture, at best, about fifty percent of the meaning between accent and idiom differences. The debate between… Read more »